Kim Förster & Common Room (Eds.)

Arts for Living offers an alternative, multifaceted history of an iconic cultural institution, The Abrons Arts Center. Located in New York City’s Lower East Side, the center was designed by Prentice and Chan, Ohlhausen, and built during the crisis-ridden 1970s as a community art center with educational facilities for a local low-income population. A rare interview with architect Lo-Yi Chan that elucidates the design process as well as essays by Alan Moore on the East Village art scene that arose out of the 1970s fiscal crisis and Kim Förster on pedagogical programs in architecture for youth in New York are accompanied by a color-photo essay by Jason Fulford depicting the current social life of the arts center. Designed by Geoff Han, and including original archival documentation, Arts for Livingis an important architectural case study of a public space designed to foster commu- nity life in a multiethnic, changing neighborhood.

Tom Matton, Vincent Kuypers and Wim Timmermans

Art, Architecture and the Politics of Public Health

Markus Miessen and Andrea Phillips

In an intensive series of texts from a symposium called Speculations on the Cultural
Organization of Civility, this book examines changing political uses of the concept
of care in democracies. Includes case studies of artistic and design interventions
within health and social care institutions and broader essays and interviews from
curators, artists, politicians, architects, and healthcare professionals. The first
volume in the Actors, Agents and Attendants series.

Interventions in Public Space – Drill Hall, Johannesburg, South Africa

Katharina Stadler & Data Chigholashvili (Eds.)

How do personal archives link public and private space, the individual and the collective? Do they contribute to a critical discussion of the future? city [un]archived
is a project book of photographs, maps and writings assembled by artist collective
Tibilisi InSights. Using the disputed borders and fractured identity and people of
Tibilisi, Georgia, as their laboratory, the collective opens up the larger global discussion
on the role of geography and systematization in shaping present-day city living.
Each chapter is devoted to a project and essay by one of the members of Tibilisi
InSights including artist/activist Tamuna Chabashvili, social anthropologist/artist Data
Chigholashvili, architect Gvantsa Nikolaishvili, conceptual artist Katharina Stadler,
media artist Lado Darakhvelidze, Nini Palavandishvili, Amsterdam-based artist Giorgi
Tabatadze and Berlin-based artist Sophia Tabatadze. Photographs and texts running
throughout the book are intended to be cross-referenced.

With an ever-increasing number of people migrating to metropolises worldwide, urban environments are the only known world for many. But as anyone who has ever watched a hawk nest on a New York City window ledge, or a coyote saunter down the streets of Beverly Hills would know, humans share a fair amount of urban space with the inhabitants—both flora and fauna—of the untamed natural world.
Note: Please use ISSN:1879-7466-8 to order.
Such is the idea behind Club Donny, a whimsical, thought-provoking bi-annual magazine functioning as “a strictly unedited journal on the personal experience of nature in the urban environment.” A full-color, unbound portfolio of photographs on folded pages (essentially a stack of double-sided A-3 posters), the format allows readers to flip through in self-determined sequences. Each issue also includes several texts relating to the Club’s romantic theme; the whole effect has the documentary weightlessness of one of Ed Ruscha’s early books.
But more than just a magazine, Club Donny is also a website (www.clubdonny.com) that invites readers to engage by submitting their own work online and participating in a conversation about life, nature and the urbanized backdrop. The site’s best feature is a page of worldwide projects—gardens, green roofs, nurseries, museums, agricultural festivals and other websites—that involve people and nature.

Samira Ben Laloua, Frank Bruggeman & Ernst van der Hoeven (Eds.)

Club Donny is a biannual magazine on the personal experience of nature in the urban environment. Contributors share views on common use and contact with the city and the associated perception of nature, offering a podium for observations, coincidences, stories and encounters to bring forward the incongruous meaning of nature. Club Donny# 9 launched as a part of the “Mapping Fleuvoland” project, which documents the re-wilding of a nature preserve in The Netherlands—from the Museum De Paviljoens, Almere. Includes 14 photographs in poster format, articles, and contributions from Annick Kleizen, Jan van Adrichem, Maarten Feenstra, Marcel van der Meijs, Petrovsky and Ramone, Wilfried Nijhof, Wouter Sibum, Yasuyuki Takagi and Yeb Wiersma, among others.

Mark von Schlegell: Ickles, Etc.

Nikolaus Hirsch & Markus Miessen (Eds.)

In this novel, noted contemporary science fiction writer Mark von Schlegell
imagines architecture in the year 2090 through the character Henries Ickles, Los
Angeles’s most misunderstood info-architect. Technological, environmental and
social catastrophes have changed the meanings of culture, nature, and landscape
forever. But in what remains of the international urban scene, architecture still
refuses to admit it hasn’t been modern since the early 20th century. In the fifth
book from the Critical Practice series, von Schlegell puts the scifi back in notions
of “speculative aesthetics.” A collection of interconnected comical stories set
in New Los Angeles, Danish Expansion, Nieuw Nieuw Amsterdam and 1970s
St. Louis, Ickles, Etc. explores the future of architectural practice in light of
developments in climatology, quasicrystalography, hyper-contemporary art,
time travel, and the EGONET. With artwork by Louise Lawler. Following New
Distopia, this is von Shlegell’s second novel to be published by Sternberg.

Beatriz Colomina

Nikolaus Hirsch & Markus Miessen (Eds.)

The third title in the celebrated Critical Spatial Practice series, Manifesto Architecture argues that the history of the avant-garde (in architecture and other disciplines) can’t be separated from the history of its engagement with media. It is not just that the avant-garde used media to publicize its work;
the work did not exist before its publication. In her succinct text, architectural historian Beatriz Colomina, director of the Media and Modernity program at Princeton University, traces the history of the modern architecture manifesto, from Le Corbusier’s Towards a New Architecture to Robert Venturi’s Complexity and Contradiction. With a particular focus on Mies van der Rohe and the play between his written and built work, this essay propels the manifesto form into the future, suggesting that we are now in the age of the “soft manifesto.”